by Rima Najjar
The question driving this essay broke open in the middle of a brief, almost forgettable Facebook exchange involving Lorenzo Galbiati, an Italian activist whose page I Palestinesi, un popolo di troppo has become a gathering point for European solidarity work, and Ian Berman, a Jewish anti-Zionist known for publicly challenging figures like Gilad Atzmon.
Their confrontation centered on an interview request for a series Galbiati was assembling on Jewish identity and anti-Zionism — an overtly introspective project framed through Jewish moral and political self-examination. Atzmon, whose name surfaces repeatedly in the exchange, occupies a far more controversial position: a radical critic of Jewish identity itself, embraced by some for his uncompromising anti-Zionism and rejected by many — including anti-Zionist Jews — for collapsing political critique into broad claims about “Jewishness,” a form of essentialism that treats identities as fixed and uniform.
Berman represents a very different tradition — one deeply attentive to the political dangers of collapsing Zionism into “the Jews,” committed to precision, and keenly aware of how accusations, alliances, or misattributions can reverberate across activist networks.
At first glance, the dispute seemed procedural: a question of whether Berman’s name had been invoked without consent, followed by clarifications, denials, and the eventual release of private messages. But as the back-and-forth intensified, something else surfaced.
The entire conversation — its justifications, anxieties, claims, and counterclaims — revolved around Jewish identity, Jewish responsibility, Jewish exposure, Jewish reputational stakes. Gaza appeared only as the crucible that made these questions emotionally charged. Palestinians themselves hovered at the edges as the site of catastrophe through which others were defining their own positionalities.
That was the moment the real question crystallized in my mind: What role does Jewish anti-Zionism actually play in Palestinian history? Is it a force that alters political outcomes? Has it ever shifted the structures that organize Palestinian dispossession? Or does it function primarily within Western — often specifically Jewish — moral and discursive worlds, gaining prominence at precisely the moments when Palestinians require something very different: pressure, leverage, interruption, consequence?
The Facebook dispute mattered only because of what it revealed. Gaza — pulverized in real time, with tens of thousands killed under unrelenting bombardment — had become the backdrop for a quarrel about Jewish boundaries and Jewish self-representation. The catastrophe was present, but as staging. The urgency flowed toward the management of Jewish identity rather than the political conditions that determine whether Palestinians live, organize, or survive.
A genocide is unfolding in real time. A century-long struggle persists. Yet public conversation still orbits Jewish self-examination while Palestinian history demands a different focus.
The Risk of Recentering Jewish Moral Reckoning
The Facebook exchange that sparked this inquiry revealed how quickly discussions of Jewish anti-Zionism can detach from Palestinian political time. Participants were ostensibly debating the stakes of Jewish dissent, yet the conversation settled almost immediately on questions of Jewish identity, guilt, and rupture. Palestinian history appeared only as the backdrop that made this reckoning possible.
That moment laid bare a broader pattern. Even during a genocide broadcast continuously—entire districts flattened, hospitals and UN shelters struck repeatedly, independent scholars such as Raz Segal describing Israeli policy as “a textbook case of genocide”—public discourse continues to gravitate toward the emotional and moral trajectories of Jews rather than the material destruction of Palestinian life.
This gravitational pull has a long genealogy. The contemporary visibility of Jewish anti-Zionism is often treated as a breakthrough, yet it enters a discursive landscape already shaped by decades of scholarship documenting how attention repeatedly shifts toward Jewish experience. Ella Shohat has shown how Zionist narrative forms situate Palestinians as obstacles in a Jewish drama of rescue and return. Edward Said traced how Western journalism and policy analysis render Palestinian demands secondary to Jewish identity debates or regional strategic concerns. Rashid Khalidi’s historical work demonstrates how Palestinian political agency is routinely absorbed into arguments unfolding inside Israel or within the Jewish diaspora, rather than analyzed on its own historical terms.
Current media coverage follows this trajectory with striking consistency. As Gaza is dismantled in real time, major outlets increasingly frame the moment as a crisis within Jewish communities. The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR have foregrounded stories of Jewish disillusionment and internal rupture, presenting them as the interpretive key to understanding the war. Palestinian political history enters these narratives primarily as the catalyst for Jewish transformation, not as a field of struggle with its own chronology, demands, and stakes.
The dynamics long identified by scholars are fully visible here. Shohat’s “relational invisibility,” Said’s analysis of the “permission to narrate,” and Steven Salaita’s critique of conditional solidarity all illuminate how Palestinian agency becomes ambient rather than central, even when the subject is the destruction of Palestinian society. This is not a matter of individual intention; it is a narrative structure that assigns depth and interiority to one set of voices while relegating another to a supporting function.
Recent reporting offers clear illustrations. In coverage from The Guardian, PBS, and the BBC, extended portraits of Jewish anti-Zionist activists frequently overshadow Palestinian analysis. A BBC segment on Jewish protesters in New York captured the mechanism precisely: viewers were guided through the protesters’ emotional journeys—betrayal, awakening, generational rupture—while the sole Palestinian voice appeared briefly, a mother in Rafah saying, “We hope the world will listen now that others are speaking for us.” Her words were framed not as a political demand but as grateful endorsement of Jewish moral arrival.
This shift compounds the problem. When Gaza is narrated as the moment “many Jews finally woke up,” Palestinian history is subordinated to Jewish moral time. Seventy-seven years of dispossession, siege, and systematic violence are compressed into a backdrop against which Jewish identity undergoes ethical transformation. Moral progress is celebrated, yet Palestinian catastrophe is once again absorbed into a story about Jewish reckoning.
Public commentary increasingly asks: What does this moment mean for Jewish identity? Can Jewish self-understanding survive the recognition of genocide? These questions may carry weight within Jewish communities. But when they dominate public discourse, they convert an ongoing political crime into material for Jewish introspection, displacing attention from the structures and actors responsible for its continuation.
One of the most developed and good-faith expressions of this dynamic can be seen in platforms such as Mondoweiss. Historically, Mondoweiss has played a significant role in widening the space within Western liberal discourse where Palestinian realities could be articulated. By foregrounding Jewish anti-Zionist dissent, the platform helped weaken institutional taboos, disrupt entrenched narratives, and render Israeli violence legible within media, academic, and advocacy circuits that had long filtered Palestinian testimony through demands for credibility and restraint. That contribution is real and consequential. Its recent republication of my essay, “The Settlers Are Not Going Anywhere,” reflects a continued insistence on confronting the structural permanence of the settler project rather than retreating into liberal narratives of reform or moral self-correction.
At the same time, Mondoweiss’s structural location within those very circuits clarifies the limits I am tracing. Because its influence operates largely through Western institutional pathways, the narratives that travel most effectively are those synchronized to institutional time—moments of rupture, recognition, and ethical recalibration. Jewish dissent and moral awakening remain especially potent vectors within these spaces and thus continue to organize attention and urgency, even when Palestinian voices are present and Israeli crimes are documented with rigor. The risk here is not erasure but re-orientation: Palestinian history becomes most legible at the moments when it catalyzes transformation elsewhere, rather than as a continuous political struggle unfolding on its own historical time.
What once functioned as a necessary form of mediation now strains against the present moment. As settlement expansion, legal enclosure, and military domination persist without interruption, the temporal rhythms through which platforms like Mondoweiss exert influence—visibility, debate, recalibration—can no longer keep pace with a struggle that no longer seeks recognition but alignment. Palestinians have outgrown a mode of mediation whose political usefulness belonged to an earlier phase of the conflict.
The persistence of this architecture, even in the midst of genocide, marks the deepest rupture with Palestinian time. The enormity of Palestinian loss has not displaced the narrative center of gravity; it has exposed how firmly that center is held. This re-orientation arrives precisely at a moment when Jewish anti-Zionist solidarity could serve a different purpose altogether: not as a moral lens through which Palestinian suffering becomes intelligible, but as a political instrument capable of challenging state power, reshaping public consent, and interrupting the systems that sustain the ongoing violence.
Jewish Anti-Zionism in Palestinian Time
The question arises because the Facebook exchange exposed a persistent habit: discussions of Jewish anti-Zionism unfold according to Jewish rhythms of crisis and awakening that bear little resemblance to the political time through which Palestinians have endured dispossession and violence.
Jewish arguments over Zionism—embracing, rejecting, or contesting it—stretch back more than a century. Over that same span, Palestinians have faced uninterrupted processes of land seizure, forced displacement, military rule, and enclosure. These histories overlap, but they unfold through different rhythms and are shaped by different forces.
Jewish anti-Zionism itself has a long lineage. Early twentieth-century religious authorities such as Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld rejected political Zionism; Bundist movements across Eastern Europe organized around a socialist, non-national framework; and thinkers like Hannah Arendt warned that a state engineered around ethnic exclusion would generate permanent conflict. These positions were widely known within Jewish communities, and Palestinians were aware of them as they emerged. They did not, however, alter the course of events on the ground, where Zionist settlement advanced under British protection and, later, U.S. strategic sponsorship.
The decisive moments in Palestinian history were shaped by institutional and military capacities operating independently of internal Jewish disagreement. During the Mandate, British authorities facilitated land transfer and settlement despite opposition from segments of the Jewish population. In 1948, more than 400 Palestinian villages were emptied and destroyed—documented by Walid Khalidi and later corroborated by Israeli state archives—without meaningful constraint from contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist voices. The 1967 occupation, the permit and zoning regime in the West Bank, the expansion of settlements, and the tightening siege on Gaza all proceeded through state mechanisms impervious to shifts in Jewish public opinion abroad.
Jewish anti-Zionism did, however, shape another domain: the discursive field in which Palestine could be spoken about in Western academic, political, and cultural institutions. Jewish critics of Zionism opened space in journals, conferences, and editorial boards where Palestinian scholarship and testimony had long faced exclusion. By the 1980s and 1990s, figures such as Ella Shohat, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler helped shift the boundaries of admissible argument, making it more difficult to dismiss Palestinian scholars like Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, and Lila Abu-Lughod outright. These interventions did not alter material conditions under occupation, but they reshaped the intellectual environment in which those conditions could be analyzed and challenged.
Palestinian movements have long recognized this distinction. Jewish dissent can amplify Palestinian arguments and offer tactical protection in hostile environments, yet it does not modify the power structures governing Palestinian life. The apparatuses that shape daily reality—military law, expropriation policies, settlement expansion, the blockade—operate according to calculations outside the orbit of Jewish ideological debate.
This recognition has informed a measured approach to Jewish dissent. Palestinian organizations have collaborated with Jewish anti-Zionists when alignment was strategic and resisted frameworks that redirected attention toward Jewish identity or moral crisis. As the BDS National Committee has stated, support is welcomed when it centers Palestinian rights and amplifies Palestinian voices without substituting for them. The principle is consistent: solidarity is assessed by its capacity to impose material accountability, not by the depth of moral confession it enables elsewhere.
Palestinian writers have articulated this boundary with clarity. Mohammed El-Kurd, for instance, has rejected the expectation that Palestinians temper their descriptions of oppression to pre-empt accusations of antisemitism. He has noted that Palestinians are often instructed—by parents or well-meaning allies—to perform exhaustive distinctions between Jews and Zionists, even as the Israeli state claims to act in the name of all Jews and embeds Jewish supremacy in its Basic Laws and military symbolism.
This demand for “surgical precision” functions less as ethical rigor than as a disciplinary mechanism. It shifts the burden onto Palestinian speech: describe the oppressor accurately and risk sanction, or self-censor and inadvertently reinforce the state’s representational claims. The distinction remains necessary to avoid essentialism, but its asymmetrical enforcement reveals how identity debates can themselves displace attention—from the ideology and machinery of dispossession onto questions of tone, attribution, and permission.
Relatedly, Noura Erakat has emphasized that the struggle against Zionism holds emancipatory potential not only for Palestinians but for Jews as well, insofar as it dismantles a system rooted in exclusion and supremacy. Solidarity, in this view, links Palestinian liberation with Jewish emancipation from Zionism’s constraints, rather than framing dissent as a Jewish moral crisis that overshadows Palestinian demands. Nada Elia echoes this position in her abolitionist feminist framework, insisting that liberation must dismantle Zionism alongside interconnected systems of domination—settler colonialism, patriarchy, racial supremacy—without exceptionalizing Jewish conscience as the primary site of transformation.
This principled stance has shaped concrete collaborations. During the First Intifada, Palestinian unions and popular committees worked with small groups of anti-Zionist Israeli activists who assisted in documenting land seizures and military abuses. The partnership was valued for its tactical utility in exposing Israeli practices internationally, yet it remained tightly bounded and never permitted to redefine the movement’s political center. The same logic guided later campaigns, including the BDS National Committee’s decision to welcome support from groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace while rejecting messaging that framed the struggle through Jewish generational trauma or moral awakening. Across these instances, the focus remained constant: identifying capacities that could constrain Zionist power and expand the field of Palestinian action.
Against this background, the surge of Jewish anti-Zionist visibility following the Gaza genocide represents a convergence of moral timelines rather than a transformation in Palestinian political history. Jewish activists describe the present as a rupture—a collapse of inherited narratives and a confrontation with state violence. Palestinians have described these conditions for decades, supported by extensive documentation from organizations such as Al-Haq, B’Tselem, and Human Rights Watch. What is new is not the reality but its reception, arriving amid catastrophic loss: entire neighborhoods destroyed, mass displacement recalling 1948, and long-term devastation that cannot be reversed.
Jewish anti-Zionism thus holds discursive significance while remaining peripheral to the material processes that define Palestinian history. It shapes debate, broadens the reach of Palestinian analysis, and strengthens advocacy campaigns. In limited cases, it has achieved tactical gains that indirectly support Palestinian objectives. Israeli organizations such as B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence have contributed detailed documentation of military abuses later used in international forums, including ICC investigations. In the diaspora, Jewish Voice for Peace has helped mobilize pressure on U.S. policy, including support for Senator Bernie Sanders’s Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (2024–2025) to block offensive arms sales—forcing historic Senate votes that exposed fractures in bipartisan consensus, even when they failed.
Yet these interventions remain constrained by the broader asymmetry of power. Discursive openings and symbolic fractures rarely translate into sustained structural change—ending the siege, halting settlement expansion, securing enforceable accountability—without Palestinian-led initiative and broader geopolitical leverage. Jewish anti-Zionism can widen the field in which Palestinian claims circulate, but it has not, on its own, altered the material apparatuses of dispossession.
Why This Recentering Impulse Is Intensifying Now
This enduring divergence in timelines — Palestinian endurance versus Jewish moral rupture — helps explain why the current surge in anti-Zionist visibility so often intensifies, rather than disrupts, the narrative recentering described earlier.
The current amplification of Jewish anti-Zionist voices emerges from a political conjuncture shaped by Gaza, but its force comes from shifts within Western legitimacy systems that once shielded Zionism from scrutiny. The conditions producing this moment are identifiable and concrete.
- The collapse of plausible denial.
The destruction in Gaza has undercut the language that sustained liberal Zionism for decades. Claims of “self-defense” or “tragic necessity” became difficult to sustain as global audiences watched live-streamed bombardments of refugee camps, the storming of Al-Shifa Hospital, and UN data showing tens of thousands killed. Statements by Israeli officials — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant describing Palestinians as “human animals,” or Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggesting that a nuclear strike on Gaza was “one of the options” — circulated widely and stripped away the rhetorical cover that once allowed supporters to bracket Israel’s violence. For many Jews raised within Zionist frameworks, the cognitive rupture has been severe, producing an introspective crisis that demands reinterpretation of identity. - The breakdown of institutional authority.
Mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States, Britain, Canada, France, and Australia responded to Gaza with near-total alignment behind the Israeli government. The Anti-Defamation League defended Israeli actions as “necessary,” AIPAC denounced calls for ceasefire as “support for Hamas,” and major federations issued statements framing criticism as antisemitism. These positions alienated many younger Jews. Walkouts at Hillel chapters, resignations from rabbis on college campuses, and the rapid growth of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow illustrate a widening gap between official leadership and their constituencies. Anti-Zionism becomes, for these groups, not only a critique of Israel but a refusal of institutional authority that no longer represents them. - The discursive opening created by Palestinian endurance.
Palestinian journalists and organizers — writing from inside Gaza under blackout, marching in diaspora-led protests — created the global space that Jewish anti-Zionist speech now occupies — documenting atrocities on social media despite repeated communications blackouts; producing analysis from inside Gaza for outlets like Al-Jazeera and Middle East Eye; and driving global protests through networks that originate in the Palestinian diaspora. Their persistence has forced Palestine into global public consciousness at a scale unmatched since the Second Intifada. Jewish anti-Zionist speech expands inside this space, drawing on an opening created by Palestinian sacrifice, not generating it. For example, the mass protests led by Palestinians across London, Johannesburg, Amman, and Chicago created the conditions in which Jewish anti-Zionist blocs could appear visibly without being treated as anomalies. - A shift in reputational incentives.
For decades, Jewish dissent from Zionism carried professional and social cost — academics risked tenure cases, rabbis risked pulpits, activists risked exclusion from communal life. Gaza has altered the equation. In journalism, for instance, several dozen Jewish writers at The New York Review of Books, Guernica, and The Nation publicly criticized their own institutions for failing to use the term “genocide.” In academia, departments that once avoided Palestine statements now face internal pressure to issue them. In entertainment and philanthropy, public silence has begun to carry its own reputational risk. This shift does not diminish the sincerity of anti-Zionist commitments, but it clarifies why they have become more publicly assertive.
These forces converge to generate a powerful urge to narrate the present as a Jewish moral turning point. Rupture invites storytelling; clarity encourages confession; visibility creates its own momentum. That momentum carries a danger: the media and even parts of the solidarity movement may treat Jewish disillusionment as the key to understanding Gaza, transforming a Palestinian catastrophe into a Jewish awakening narrative.
The central question is no longer why Jewish anti-Zionism is increasingly visible. It is why visibility so rapidly morphs into narrative dominance — why a crisis produced through Palestinian experience is so easily reframed as a crisis unfolding within Jewish identity.
When — and Only When — Jewish Anti-Zionism Is Politically Useful
From a Palestinian historical perspective, usefulness is measured by impact on the structures that sustain dispossession. Moral force, rhetorical clarity, and expressions of conscience matter far less than whether an intervention disrupts the systems that organize Palestinian life under occupation, siege, and exile. Jewish anti-Zionism becomes politically meaningful only under identifiable conditions.
- When it targets institutions rather than identities.
Effective interventions name the actors who wield power. Examples are concrete:
• The lawsuits filed in U.S. federal court challenging the Biden administration’s weapons transfers to Israel were strengthened by affidavits from Jewish organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace Action, which framed the issue around arms export statutes and executive responsibility.
• In Britain, Jewish activists within the Labour Party documented how party disciplinary mechanisms were weaponized to silence Palestine advocacy — an institutional critique that forced procedural reforms.
These interventions focused on governments, procurement systems, military chains of command, and legal infrastructures, reinforcing Palestinian demands for accountability. - When it refuses substitution and blocks the tendency to treat Jewish voices as authorizing.
Jewish anti-Zionists become politically useful when they redirect attention toward Palestinian authority rather than absorbing it.
In many 2024–2025 campus encampments, Jewish anti-Zionists affiliated with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace worked to center Palestinian organizers in media interactions and protest leadership, resisting framing that positioned Jewish voices as more ‘credible’ or ‘safer’ intermediaries. This practice helped shift some coverage toward Palestinian testimony rather than filtering it through Jewish perspectives.
Interventions that guard against substitution strengthen Palestinian presence instead of overshadowing it. - When it acknowledges asymmetry and avoids recasting Gaza as a crisis of Jewish ethics.
Political usefulness requires a clear understanding of stakes. Jewish anti-Zionists do not face the material consequences Palestinians endure: home demolition, siege, displacement, arrest, or death.
Jewish groups that recognized this asymmetry acted differently during the Gaza genocide. At mass demonstrations in New York, Chicago, and Paris, Jewish blocs marched behind Palestinian-led contingents and adopted signage that foregrounded Palestinian demands — ceasefire, end of arms transfers, sanctions — rather than centering Jewish moral trauma. This clarity prevented the reframing of Gaza as a Jewish existential crisis. - When it aligns with Palestinian political objectives and engages arenas of material leverage.
Jewish anti-Zionists hold access and influence in certain Western institutions that Palestinians are systematically denied. Political usefulness emerges when that access is used deliberately.
• Jewish Voice for Peace and allied groups publicly mobilized support for Senator Bernie Sanders’s multiple Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (2024–2025) to block offensive arms sales to Israel, contributing to unprecedented Senate votes that exposed fractures in bipartisan consensus.
• Anti-Zionist Jewish artists withdrew their works from exhibitions at institutions like the Contemporary Jewish Museum in 2024, protesting perceived complicity with censorship of Palestinian voices and demanding greater transparency in funding sources.
• In Germany, Jewish artists, scholars, and activists signed open letters in 2024 criticizing resolutions that restrict funding for critics of Israel, highlighting how such measures endanger non-Zionist Jews and stifle free expression.
These interventions engaged the actual machinery of power. - When it knows how and when to step back.
Some moments call for amplification rather than interpretation.
In key international moments, such as the ICJ genocide hearings brought by South Africa, Jewish anti-Zionist groups amplified submissions from South African and Palestinian legal teams — circulating documentation from organizations like Al-Haq and Al Mezan — while avoiding frameworks that recentered the analysis on Jewish perspectives.
When these conditions are met, Jewish anti-Zionism can function as a strategic asset: it fractures elite consensus, strips ideological cover from state violence, disrupts legitimizing narratives in Western institutions, and expands the space in which Palestinian political claims can circulate. Without these conditions, its consequences shift. Palestinian history becomes secondary, and attention migrates toward Jewish self-examination — another form of displacement, enacted through narrative gravity rather than erasure.
The distinction carries political weight because it determines whether Jewish anti-Zionism strengthens Palestinian agency or absorbs the story back into Jewish identity. One trajectory expands the field of struggle. The other compresses it.
These conditions clarify what gives Jewish anti-Zionism political force and why visibility or conviction alone rarely shifts Palestinian political time.
Contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism also takes organized form, most visibly through Jewish Voice for Peace, whose institutional reach in the United States — across media, campuses, philanthropy, and congressional advocacy — provides a level of access largely unavailable to Palestinian organizations.
That access carries both capacity and constraint. In a 2020 essay addressing then–executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson, I argued that JVP’s leadership often translated Palestinian demands into frameworks calibrated for Jewish acceptability, prioritizing coalition safety over sustained confrontation with the structures that sustain Israeli impunity. That tension remains instructive. JVP can disrupt silence and mobilize numbers, yet its political reach contracts when Jewish framing becomes the passage through which Palestinian claims must travel.
Alongside nationally embedded organizations such as JVP, transnational networks like the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network have articulated an explicitly anti-colonial Jewish opposition to Zionism across borders. Their analysis has been clear and consistent, though it has not translated into sustained leverage over arms transfers, diplomatic protection, or legal impunity.
Neturei Karta, by contrast, operate outside liberal and institutional circuits altogether. Their theological rejection of Zionism predates the state, and their public alignment with Palestinian slogans is direct. Their marginalization by Israeli authorities marks the narrow limits of tolerated dissent. At the same time, their intervention remains symbolic, without influence over arms flows, diplomatic cover, or legal regimes.
Taken together, JVP and Neturei Karta delineate the outer bounds of Jewish anti-Zionism today: one embedded and influential yet constrained by institutional positioning; the other uncompromising and present yet structurally peripheral. Neither alters Palestinian political time on its own. Both clarify the conditions under which Jewish dissent acquires material force — and the point at which it does not.
The present moment exposes a truth that has shaped Palestinian history for generations: political change follows shifts in power, not shifts in sentiment. Gaza has not revealed a hidden dimension of Zionism; it has eroded the credibility of the frameworks that once justified it. As those frameworks falter, the struggle over interpretation sharpens, and the question of who frames the present acquires heightened political consequence.
Conclusion: What This Moment Demands
Jewish anti-Zionists now occupy a position of visibility within institutions — media, universities, cultural platforms — that have long excluded or marginalized Palestinian voices. That visibility can destabilize entrenched narratives and widen the space for accountability. It can also be drawn into familiar arcs of ethical self-discovery that transform Palestinian catastrophe into a stage for Jewish transformation.
The difference lies in orientation: interventions that foreground Palestinian political demands apply pressure to the systems sustaining dispossession; interventions that center Jewish moral introspection pull the moment back into established narrative habits.
Political change rarely tracks the maturation of conscience. It advances when legitimacy fractures, alliances reorganize, and the costs of maintaining a system rise. Jewish anti-Zionism carries force when it contributes to these pressures — interrupting policy consensus, challenging arms transfers, undermining diplomatic cover, and supporting Palestinian organizing across borders. Its influence recedes when it turns inward, inviting renewed reflection on Jewish identity against the backdrop of Palestinian suffering.
For Palestinians, the consequences of these narrative choices are never abstract. They register in land confiscated or defended, movement restricted or expanded, lives threatened or protected. Solidarity that loses sight of this drifts. Solidarity that holds it steady becomes part of the terrain on which pressure accumulates.
This moment calls for interventions that shift structures rather than attention, that reinforce Palestinian analysis rather than absorb it, that operate where leverage exists rather than where comfort lies. Jewish anti-Zionism becomes consequential when it moves along this axis — and loses consequence when it circles back toward itself.
An alternative orientation is already taking shape in coalitions that prioritize Palestinian-led demands, target specific nodes of power — arms manufacturers, congressional funding pipelines, university endowments — and treat Jewish dissent as tactical reinforcement rather than moral centerpiece.
When solidarity organizes along these coordinates — disrupting material support rather than narrating ethical rupture — it becomes part of the pressure capable, over time, of altering the calculus of dispossession.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
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